Pap Fiction | Quentin Tarantino

Pap Fiction | Quentin Tarantino | The Final Cut | Movies | Entertainment Weekly
Tarantino and I are the same age — we were both born in 1963 — so I’m speaking middle-aged guy to middle-aged guy when I say that it’s time to put away childish things. Manic jags of hyperbole about vintage crap start to wear thin once you’re only a couple of Presidential elections away from your AARP years. Guys who love movies — no matter what their age — tend to overrate the films they loved between the ages of, say, 13 and 20, when they were — how to put this politely? — easy to stimulate. Tarantino, who loves movies more than anything else, grabbed on to the bargain-basement genres of the early 1970s — the stuff he wasn’t quite old enough to see when it opened — and he’s never let go.

In 1994, his enthusiasm yielded Pulp Fiction, which felt entirely new — intricately structured but playful, wild in its violence yet able to accommodate a witty line or gesture without seeming to pause, perfectly acted, always surprising, and (despite its title) never simply a gloss on old material. Since then, though, Tarantino seems to have started believing that his own worst qualities are what distinguish him. He’s abandoned what was great about Pulp Fiction (control, impeccable pacing, utter originality, knowing when the characters should stop talking) and decided that what people really want from him is chatty, protracted dialogue scenes, elaborately arch pop-culture references, and ass-kicking action — in other words, easy imitations of his own biggest success.